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Puttingtheprocessbackin:Rethinkingservicesector
skill
Ian Hampson
The University of New South Wales

Anne Junor
The University of New South Wales

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Work,
Employment and Society, 24(3) September 2010: 526-545,
doi:10.1177/0950017010371664
by SAGE Publications Ltd./SAGE Publications, Inc., All rights reserved.
URL: http://wes.sagepub.com

ABSTRACT

Service skill definitions have been over-extended, by equating compliance with skill,
and under-developed, by not recognising service jobs invisible social and
organisational aspects. Existing approaches to determining service skill levels draw
on occupational qualifications and capacity for labour market closure, on knowledge
worker/knowledgeable emotion worker dichotomies, and on the conceptual conflation
of labour process deskilling, unskilled jobs and unskilled workers. The theoretical and
empirical basis for a new framework identifying hitherto under-specified work
process skills is outlined. This framework allows recognition of the integrated use of
awareness-shaping, relationship-shaping and coordination skills, at different levels of
experience-based complexity, derived from reflexive learning and collective problem-
solving in the workplace. Political struggles over the use of combinations and levels
of these skills of experience may result either in jobs designed to reduce autonomy,
or in improved skill recognition and development, enhancing equity and career paths.

KEY WORDS
articulation work/ emotional labour/ service work/ skill/ work process knowledge/
workplace learning/ equity
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Introduction

The growth of service sector employment has problematised the meaning of skill
(Hilton, 2008). Employers have overextended the concept to include required
employee attributes and attitudes (Keep and Mayhew, 1999), defining skill to reflect
their preferences for compliant workers (Lafer, 2004). However, employers also say
they need human capacities for independent problem-solving, self-direction,
collaboration in self-managing teams, ethical judgment, and the capacity for
negotiation and empathetic interaction qualities that sit uneasily with
submissiveness. When employers recruit on the basis of maturity or experience,
for what life or work skills may these be proxies? When care-workers expostulate that
they earn no more after ten years than on entry, or than their offspring earn at a
supermarket checkout (Richardson and Martin, 2004: 26-7), are they perhaps
expressing a conviction that their work involves a range of skills, based on experience
acquired in the process of working? Such real practical expertise is often under-
recognised and unrewarded (Gatta et al., 2007), and one reason for this is lack of a
vocabulary to register certain tacit skills and the levels at which they are applied. Pay
and employment equity are advanced only through political contestation, but an
adequate skill vocabulary may be part of such contestation (Hall and Reed, 2007).

One of the future scenarios for the service sector is the development of an hourglass,
or barbell shaped distribution of skills. From this perspective, a relatively small
minority of knowledge workers will have thinking skills but many more will rely
on social competencies now defined as low level (Autor, 2007; Thompson, 2007:
89). Nevertheless, the skills required in service occupations, whether defined as low,
middle or high level, need further examination. Some see these skills as natural
attributes, that anyone would want to have (Autor, 2007, in Hilton, 2008: 13); as
mundane accomplishments in plentiful supply (Attewell, 1990: 423; Payne, 2009:
355: Lloyd and Payne, 2009: 12). Others argue that many social competences are
forms of skilled emotion management, that not all workers will have (Bolton, 2005).
It is argued here that a multiplicity of forms of service sector work may be performed
at varying levels of proficiency, and that these require capacities that include, but
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extend beyond, the emotional. These include awareness of contexts and
consequences, capacity for moral and aesthetic judgment, rapid contextual evaluation,
intercultural competence, and organisational ability. These human capacities are
skills, and the article explicates an attempt to develop an empirically grounded
taxonomy, designed to allow identification of their use at a range of levels.

From 2006 to 2008 the authors were part of a team funded by the New Zealand (NZ)
Department of Labour Pay and Employment Equity Unit, working to develop new
techniques for identifying service skills (New Zealand Government, 2009). The skills
framework that arose from this project, outlined here, has been used successfully in
public and community sector trials, to help pinpoint the exercise of hitherto under-
specified capabilities, bringing a new rigour to the identification of levels of expertise
in their workplace application. The framework is not an exhaustive list of service
skills. Rather it provides a conceptual basis for investigating the use, in specific work
contexts, of three broad sets of skills that are central to service sector work. It also
provides a way of identifying five learning stages through which these skills are
developed by reflective practice, both individual and collective. While this conceptual
taxonomy is now starting to be used in practice in parts of the NZ community care
sector to help define under-specified job content and worker capabilities, the focus
here is on its theoretical implications for debates over service sector skill.

First the emerging range of service industries and occupations is examined, and it is
noted that employers report some service skills to be in short supply. Next the article
overviews the concepts on which the research drew, based on labour process theory
(LPT), interactionist insights and a theory of workplace learning. The third section
describes the empirical project, explaining the methods of gathering and analysing
data from a cross-section of service jobholders, cross-referencing theory and data
analysis. The final section outlines the resulting taxonomy of process skills,
illustrating how it aids the naming of more specific skills at a range of levels. The
conclusion explores the potential contribution of the findings to LPT.

Who are Service Workers?

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Across UK industry groupings, in March 2009, 81 per cent of employees were located
in service jobs. The largest grouping was administration, education and health (33 per
cent), followed by distribution, hotels and restaurants (20 per cent), and banking,
finance and insurance (16 per cent). NZ, where we undertook our empirical research,
had a very similar industry distribution (Office for National Statistics, 2009; Statistics
NZ, 2007).

Occupational evidence gives only qualified support to the thesis that service skills are
distributed hourglass-fashion. In the UK in March 2009, 29 per cent of employees
overall were assigned to managerial or professional occupations and another 15 per
cent were defined as associate professional or technical employees. A middle 22 per
cent were evenly divided between clerical/administrative staff and skilled trades. The
lower end (34 per cent) comprised four groupings: personal service workers (mainly
health and child care) (9 per cent), sales and customer service workers (including call
centre staff) (7 per cent), process, plant and machine operatives (7%), and elementary
employee groups including hospitality workers, hospital porters, cleaners and security
staff (12 per cent) (Office for National Statistics, 2009). NZ had a roughly similar
occupational distribution (Statistics NZ, 2007).

This distribution was hourglass-shaped only if we assume that all health and child
care workers were low-skilled. True, a 2008 Statistics NZ survey of over 25,000
organisations indicated that, at the point of recruitment, skill shortages were greatest
in trade, professional and managerial occupations. But it also indicated that, owing to
lack of experience half of all existing employees did not have the skills required to
do their jobs well: and that skills in customer service, team working and oral
communication were most lacking (Statistics NZ, 2008). These findings provide
support for our thesis, that entry-level qualifications may not certify the work process
skills required for effective work performance, and that such skills are acquired only
through workplace practice. The shortage of these skills questions their designation as
mundane accomplishments in plentiful supply. Applying the analogy of Brown et al.
(2001: 36), they are not plug and play capacities that workers bring to the job and
immediately switch on and use. Rather, they are like a flat pack: they need to be
built up and integrated with the requirements of their surrounds. Conceptualising the
skills of experience in this way helps explain why apparently abundant low level
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skills in the community require workplace learning and in some cases formal training,
before they can be applied at the required level of expertise. Paid community care
work is a case in point.

Theorising service skills

Insights from Labour Process Theory

The fundamental LPT problematic is the quest to manage commodified but
indeterminate labour power to secure valorisation and safeguard accumulation
(Thompson, 1989: 241-243). Thus the indeterminacy of labour power is the problem,
control is the solution, and deskilling is the most fully realised form of control,
resulting in subordination, and involving erosion of both autonomy and task
complexity. LPT has been extended to commodified work that is not low-skilled:
professional, associate professional, public sector and even managerial work
(Ackroyd, 2009). Whilst not defined as low-skill in terms of qualifications, and less
likely to suffer loss of task complexity, these occupations are formally subordinated to
other managerial control and work intensification systems such as responsible
autonomy (Friedman, 1990), high performance work systems (Danford, 2003) and
individual performance target-setting. For these reasons, macro-analysis suggests that
task complexity and worker autonomy may be trending in opposite directions
(Felstead et al., 2004).

Hochschild famously extended the loss of employee autonomy to the managerial
regulation of feeling within service work. She saw emotional labour as no small part
of what trainers train, and supervisors supervise (1993: xii) thus defining it as both
learned and political behaviour. She extended her analysis beyond airline cabins, debt
collection, department stores and hospitality, to health, welfare and education. But
subordination is a tendency never fully achieved, and Korczynski (2002) and Bolton
(2005) in particular explore areas of contradiction within emotional labour. Bolton, in
describing flight attendants and call center workers as skilled emotion managers,
emphasises both moral agency and adroit management of self, others and situations.
Thus across a range of occupational levels, micro-analysis of the intangible cognitive
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and affective elements of the service labour process reveals that the relationship
between autonomy and complexity is not clear-cut.

It is perhaps the parallels with technologically-controlled factory production that have
made areas of retail and telemarketing a focus of LPT analyses of service work,
although these are a minority of service jobs, and entry to them requires
uncharacteristically low levels of educational qualifications and life/work experience.
Even so, much customer service call centre work undoubtedly demands uncodified
skills of experience. Thus Taylor and Bain (2004: 17) argue that call centre work is
repetitive, routinised, and dominated by short cycle times but at times it
requires deeper skills (2004: 28). However, a vocabulary to name these skills is
missing. Callaghan and Thompson (2002: 248) similarly see some call centre workers
as ...active and skilled emotion managers, whilst allocating them to low level
status. These writers propose the concept of knowledgeability
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to encapsulate how
interactive service workers display
consciousness of their social skills and an awareness of when and how to deploy these. It is
possible to see this personal awareness as a kind of tacit knowledge, where workers develop
an understanding of themselves that allows them to consciously use their emotions to
influence the quality of the interactive service sector product (Thompson et al., 2001: 937-8).

The concept of knowledgeability needs elaboration, lest it become a carpet
sweeper term for capacities, the basis of whose differentiation from skill is
incompletely defined.

The historical strand within LPT has tended to define skill as employees capacity to
retain control of facets of the labour process. In particular there has been a focus on
unions power to turn skill recognition, based on entry qualifications, into
occupational closure, thus gaining a defence against role fragmentation and skill
dilution (Thompson, 1989: 46-53). It is within this analytical tradition that Payne
(2009) challenges the claim that emotion work is skilled. He warns against the over-
extension of skill claims, satirising the view that we are all skilled now and
critiquing attempts to define non-technical activities, however complex, as skilled
(also see Lloyd and Payne, 2009).

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Yet skill cannot be equated simply with labour market strategies based on
occupational closure. Workplace learning theory points to the importance of the
ongoing development of the situated, tacit and often collective capacity to carry out
work processes (Lave and Wenger, 1991). For strategic reasons, employers may
recognise the development of uncredentialled skills for some employees, through
internal job ladders, and refuse such recognition to others (Osterman, 1987). Workers,
however, may be able to claim skill through legal or industrial campaigns. The
managerial tool of job evaluation has been used with some success to gain skill
recognition in feminised jobs (Hall and Reed, 2007; Steinberg, 1998). In Australia,
the industrial relations system, which allows collective skill assessments based on
work value claims, is a potential pay equity vehicle. The majority report of a recent
parliamentary inquiry recommends a system for pursuing job or occupational
revaluation through claims that skill and responsibility have been historically
undervalued on a gender basis (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2009).
Many submissions to this inquiry argued the undervaluing of service skills, linked to
the invisibility of womens skills (eg. p.7); the perception of womens skills as
natural attributes or social skills, rather than industrial or workplace skills (eg p.55);
and failure to specify skills relating to caring, communications and personal
interaction (eg p.57).

The rest of this article outlines the stages of an empirical study we undertook for the
NZ Department of Labour, precisely to identify and classify such service skills,
starting with the theoretical derivation of our research and interview questions.

Theorising service skill content

One starting point was Boltons (2005) innovative combination of LPT with
interactionist concepts, particularly those of Goffman, to analyse work processes
involving skilled emotion management. As Bolton and Houlihan (2005) point out,
service work cannot be fully routinised, since work on other people involves ethical
juggling, and subtle judgment of effects. Another interactionist, Strauss, provides an
extensive typology of the content of sentimental (emotion) work, as well as a sense
of how it is interwoven with various other forms of work in time (Strauss et al. 1985:
133-139). Based on studies of hospital work, these researchers identify: negotiative,
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composure, rectification, awareness-context, and dirty work (the latter involving
ethical conflicts, as well as emptying bedpans), which embrace both emotional and
cognitive domains. Awareness context work refers to the shaping of ones own
awareness and that of others. For example, staff withholding information which they
believe will be difficult for a person to handle are involved in a subtle interplay of
personal ethics, will and identity, as well as negotiating the compulsion of political
and economic structures.

Central to the analysis was the Straussian notion of work as a process, with workers
collectively and individually coordinating disparate components of work into a
smooth flow. Strauss et al. (1985) referred to this process as articulation work, a
supra type of work, involving the coordination of tasks in time, in individual lines
and collective arcs and trajectories of work (Strauss, 1985: 2, 8). Articulation
work skills are the second order or reflexive skills of integrating lower levels of
skill, and interweaving lines of work. They include situational awareness, relationship
management and interpersonal negotiation (Strauss, et al., 1985: 87). Extending this
analysis, service work in health, education, community services and administration
also required linking activities (follow-through, follow-up), and continuity of
awareness in the management, establishment, maintenance and termination of
relationships that extend well beyond the one-off transactions on which analysts of
interactive frontline work seem to focus. Coordination and ethical juggling come
together in managing the conflicting demands of clock time and clients process
time (Davies, 1994): time management goes beyond scheduling, to include the
accommodation of diverse temporalities.

Beyond content analyses of service skill, the research sought a way of
conceptualising skill levels. Mainstream occupational and job analysis techniques,
which like LPT use the dimensions of autonomy-control and substantive
complexity proved to be of limited help in identifying service skills at different levels
(Spenner, 1990). By taking the task as their basic unit, they overlook the skills
required to link tasks up into processes (Forfs, 2007: 24). Moreover, the formal
vocational qualifications that define occupational skill levels tend to anatomise task
skills, with less attention to dynamic work process skills (Boreham, 2002).

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Theorising service skill levels

This shift of focus to integrated work processes has implications for LPT. The
managerial routinisation of complex processes may rely on workers being sufficiently
skilled to work automatically, incorporating contingency and linking together
activities into smooth sequences. If so, there is no automatic fit between deskilling
processes, unskilled jobs and minimally-qualified workers. LPT, in focusing on
contests over autonomy and complexity, has paid rather little attention to skill
development, and articulation work theory does not help in theorising skill levels,
beyond its concept of supra work (Strauss, 1985: 2, 8). To identify levels of
proficiency in the exercise of tacit service skills, is to begin to move beyond the
skilled/unskilled dichotomy toward a concept of workplace skill formation as the
staged assimilation of practical learning, resulting in expertise achieved over time.

Individually-focused learning theory describes how, after repeated practice, a novice
acquires the proficiency to carry out a process (like keyboarding) automatically,
releasing cognitive resources for other activity (like composition) (Dreyfus and
Dreyfus, 1986; Shuell, 1990). In time, the worker can apply experience at a level of
automaticity, and is cognitively freed to focus on solving new problems. Activity
theory (Leontev, 1978; Sawchuk, 2006) similarly describes how novices build a base
of experience through iterations of practice, reflection and problem-solving. Thus our
first three skill levels were derived: familiarisation, automatic fluency, and proficient
problem solving. To take account of the collective basis of workplace learning,
however, the analysis was deepened and extended to a fourth learning level of
creative solution sharing, where experienced workers informally pool their work
process knowledge. The knowledge, and the collective learning process, may be tacit
or explicit, involving both verbal, and less explicit and more fleeting, information
exchange. Learning takes place, knowledge is transmitted, and identity is shaped,
through steadily increasing participation in communities of interaction/practice
(Sandberg, 2000; Brown and Duguid, 1991). This analysis moves beyond the Anglo-
liberal view of competence as something that is always individual (Boreham 2004). It
is congruent with the theory of work process knowledge (Boreham et al, 2002),
which reinforces the importance of situational and process awareness as foundational
skills and informed our empirical study of service skills.
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Empirical evidence

Methodological basis

Workplace interviews, conducted in the latter part of 2006, focused on service
employment in the NZ core public service, health and education sectors, which
accounted for approximately 15 per cent of the total workforce or a little over 20 per
cent of the service sector. Occupationally, jobs in the NZ core public service
workforce are 50 per cent managerial, professional and associate professional, 34 per
cent clerical and administrative, and 13 per cent community and personal service
based (State Services Commission, 2007). Relative to the total service sector, the
research sample was therefore skewed to more highly qualified occupational levels. In
2008-2009 further research tested the wider relevance of the taxonomy derived from
such jobs, through validation studies in the community care sector. The addition of
more low-status jobs tended to confirm the relevance of the approach to
approximately one-third of service jobs those in non-profit sectors.

Occupational evidence gives only qualified support to the thesis that service
skills are distributed hourglass-fashion. In the UK in March 2009, 29 percent
of employees overall were assigned to managerial or professional
occupations and another 15 percent were defined as associate professional or
technical employees. A middle 22 percent were evenly divided between clerical/
administrative staff and skilled trades. The lower end (29%) comprised
three groupings: personal service workers (mainly health and child care) (9%),
sales and customer service workers (including call centre staff) (8%), and elementary
employee groups including hospitality workers, hospital porters,
cleaners and security staff (12%) (Office for National Statistics, 2009). NZ had
a roughly similar occupational distribution (Statistics NZ, 2007).
It cannot be assumed that all 29 percent in the three lowest-level occupations
(for example health and child care workers) were low-skilled workers

The original study took the form of semi-structured interviews, averaging 90 minutes
in duration, with workers in 57 different jobs, ranging in level from administrative
assistant to senior policy adviser; from education support worker to senior lecturer;
and from patient receptionist and care assistant to director of nursing. A quarter of the
jobs were in predominantly male occupations, a third were in gender mixed
occupations and a little over half were in jobs that were over 70 per cent female. The
interviews produced completed questionnaires and 1,600 pages of transcripts
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containing discussions of critical incidents and workplace learning trajectories. To
this data set we added 94 position descriptions and job evaluation reports. Iterative
coding, based on the NVivo software program and the Strauss-Corbin (1998)
abstraction technique, was used to group and condense similar work activities, from
which we drew a matrix of irreducible under-specified work process skill elements
and learning stages. Collaborative discussion of many iterations of this coding finally
narrowed it down to nine skill elements grouped into the three skill sets of shaping
awareness, interacting and relating, and coordination. The final condensation of 150
activity examples from which these skills were abstracted was found to be readily
organised into the four skill levels outlined above, plus a fifth level, drawn mainly
from accounts by official and unofficial experts and leaders, of how they actively
shaped solutions, embedding them in work systems.

Table 1 sets out the resulting framework of skill sets, elements and levels. Each skill
is an individual capability for participating in a collective work activity. We turned
the 150 activities, classified according to the skill elements and skill levels they
illustrate, into a checklist that could be used to map job skill requirements and
workers skills. In 2008 we tested various uses of this framework as an aid to
position description writing, selection, individual development planning, job
sequencing and career pathing, in a two day workshop with public, education and
health sector managers, and then with 100 workshop participants from community
sector organisations. In 2009, one-on-one trials with community sector workers have
shown the effectiveness of the framework in building integrated individual profiles of
skills and developmental targets. In the rest of this article, we illustrate how this
taxonomy can be used to analyse the skills underpinning work activity and processes,
concentrating on front-line reception work, low-paid support roles, and several
middle level jobs such as IT support and casework.



TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Applying a new service skills framework
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The analysis develops two argument. Firstly work involving responsibility for the care
or development of others, or for the negotiated maintenance of work systems, is likely
to involve some complexity in the integrated use of non-mundane, and often tacit,
skills of awareness-management, inter-relating and coordination. Second, autonomous
proficiency in deploying these skills develops with experience. As a result, further
theorisation is needed of the relationship between two types of skills: those acquired
through formal learning and certified in qualifications, and those gained through
collective workplace learning.

Exemplifying the use of work process skills in low level personal service occupations,
an Occupational Therapy Assistant (OTA) worked in a job classified at a lower level
even than hospital-based Personal Care Assistants. She commented:

Were undervalued I think by the hospital system [I]ts not recognised, the skills or the
values The care assistants have got formal training; the occupational therapy assistants
havent got that paperwork behind us. (OTA, NZ, 2006)

After two years nursing training, this informant turned to OTA work for its more
holistic approach: [Y]ou can work with families not just dealing with the injury
or the condition. The job had three components: daily reception and administrative
work, handling phone calls and mail relating to clients, families and equipment
suppliers; and unpacking, cataloguing and assembling rehabilitation equipment: This
required contextual awareness skills (So yes, you have to know what the equipment
is and what its about), as well as an understanding of the work of the rehabilitation
team (the OTA minuted regular cross-disciplinary team meetings).

The second aspect of the work involved both daily rounds of the hospital ward,
providing ADL (assistance with daily living) and frequent home visits, assembling
and adjusting equipment and coaching in its use. Teamwork was involved (Youre
working with a physiotherapist, youre working with the speech therapist) and work
with clients required finely-tuned communication and boundary-management skills:

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Learning how to encourage people to do things for themselves without being condescending.
My communication skills have certainly picked up The hardest thing I had to learn was let
the patient do it for themselves rather than you do it. (OTA, NZ, 2006)

The third aspect of the job was to accompany therapists one day a week, on house
calls in a regional community, providing safety backup through contingency
management. The job involved the negotiation of both subordination and autonomy:

I think it is something you learn as you go...Theres a lot of independence: you have to make
decisions [but] there is a line there and you have to refer to a therapist Especially the
younger therapists, I feel because I'm a little bit older, youre imparting your knowledge to them
because they havent had the experience. Youve got to be very diplomatic, if that makes sense?
(OTA, NZ, 2006)

To integrate the jobs three lines of work, and fold them into the hospitals ongoing
arc of work, required coordinating and negotiating skills:

Time management was one of my hardest ones and its something Ive been working on with the
team leader. . [B]ecause I cover different areas, I'm learning to say no, and work in with the
other therapists. [They] ask you to do different things, because theres only a certain amount of
time that you have in the day and being able to say No, I cant do that now, but I can do it at
such and such a time. So youre planning all the time and then being able to adjust your day
because theyre little emergencies and things that pop up all the time, so youve got to fit those
in. (OTA, NZ, 2006)

This example illustrates the integrated use of many of the elements identified in Table
1 management of the awareness of self, others, situations and impacts; negotiation of
boundaries, communication across class and culture, and integrated maintenance of
work flows.

Similarly low in occupational status and paid close to the minimum wage are an
estimated 20,000 NZ school support staff working in roles such as teacher aides,
administrators, and resource co-coordinators. Special Education Support Workers
(ESWs) are assigned, often on a one-to-one basis, to help children with disabilities
integrate and learn in preschool and school classrooms. Low-level post-school
qualifications are increasingly being gained, often after years in the job. The tacit
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skills involved in this work can be gleaned from accounts of apparently mundane
incidents such as the following (relating to a three-year old Mori child with spina
bifida):

Id been playing around the theme of this is a spoon, this is a drawerThen its clean-
up timeI said, Could you put it in the drawer? and she did it. Its just a little thing but she
did it. She understood So those sorts of thing are the little steps they make all the time.
(Special Education Support Worker, NZ, 2006)

This example illustrates the use of verbal and non-verbal communication cues, and a
fine-tuned awareness of the significance of incidents within longer-term changes in
the child. A detailed developmental program was discussed daily with teachers and
parents and regularly within a multi-disciplinary care team. The skills required
included a subtle awareness of reactions and impacts; interpretative non-verbal
communication, and activity-sequencing and interweaving. Vigilant to small warning
signs, the ESW routinely managed problems ranging from constant risk of falls to
dealing with epileptic seizures without disturbing other children or the flow of activity
in an open-plan classroom. The work required skills in managing up and advocacy
at the level of problem-solving: the ESW has previously needed to draw on strategic
negotiating skills to persuade a teacher to abandon her enthusiasm for a new
approach, because of its detrimental effects on one child. She had picked up on the
emotional exhaustion of a mother of autistic twins, and used silent empathetic
listening to avert the risk of family trauma. Another ESW, responsible for up to six
older children in a special needs centre, had trouble naming the non-verbal
communication skills she used in quietly encouraging school-refusers into the
classroom, blocking out the screaming and maintaining a reassuring firmness. She
described how through experience she had learned to maintain a stable working
environment with children likely to respond to any frustration by biting and kicking,
and the wisdom needed to manage grief at the deaths of frail severely-disabled
children. Such skills of insight into self and others that underpinned this work of
social integration are unlikely to be in plentiful supply off the street.

The tacit skills of experience identified in Table 1 were also seen as important in jobs
requiring tertiary-level occupational qualifications:
15

[H]aving the qualification got me the job, but now Im doing stuff that the qualification didnt
show me ... You actually need someone with great listening skills, and a qualifications not
going to give you that. You do have to have a certain amount of knowledge, and the tertiary
qualification will give you that, but it also asks for skills that a qualification is not going to
give you. (Information Technology Helpdesk Officer, Polytechnic, NZ, 2006)

This example raises the question of whether the tacit experiential skills identified in
Table 1 were similar at different occupational levels. Certainly, beginning workers in
jobs at different occupational levels all had to start by using Level 1 familiarisation
skills. For the IT support workers, this involved contextual awareness and boundary
management skills:

Territory would be a big issue ... And thats almost like that political context as well.I have
a couple of what I consider to be almost mentors, and Ill pick their brains. Yes. Finding
someone who knows. It can take a while sometimes, cant it?
Yes, especially when you talk to the wrong people.
MisinformationIts also asking the right person, and that is a trick of the trade as well. (Two
IT Support staff, Polytechnic, NZ, 2006)

The reflective and self-reflexive aspects of assessing information and people in
context entitle these capabilities to be labelled skills. Such skills may be exercised at
varying levels within jobs at all qualification levels. We use the example of
administrative assistant/reception work, to illustrate the progression from skill Level 1
(familiarisation) to Level 2 (automatic fluency) and Level 3 (problem-solving). The
example is based on work in a rehabilitation outpatients clinic, involving the follow-
up of discharged patients, administration of pain-management programs, and
coordination with welfare and accident compensation agencies, as well as
management of client queues. This front-line worker built her awareness of contexts
and consequences, and used the interpersonal skills of boundary-setting and reading
people to enable her to maintain a smooth workflow. She quickly learned to manage
her own awareness of situations and people, as importunate pain-sufferers tried to
gain immediate access to doctors:

They quite often ring you and try to seek a lot of information out of you, which I wasnt
prepared for. And because I hadnt worked in a medical environment before, I wasnt quite
16
sure of what those boundaries were. So.... I had to go back and check with people that I was
offering the right level of information what the limitations were. (Administrative
Assistant, NZ, 2006)

It proved necessary to build up a lay understanding of medical terms, which our
informant did by maintaining a notebook. This ambiguously authorized knowledge
was necessitated by the unofficial triage element of the work, one of whose main
goals involved the use of coordinating skills to ensure that the doctors workflow
proceeded without interruption. Self-awareness and boundary-management skills
were required at the problem-solving level (level 3):

youve got to try and second guess how important these things are, before you can interact
And youre building up your medical knowledge about how important something is. And
not getting so emotionally involved and realising theres a limit to what you can and cant do.
(Administrative Assistant, NZ, 2006)

This example illustrates the cognitive element in emotional labour: [i]ts sort of
stepping back from the situation and having a look at the big picture. It also
illustrates why such skills may be in short supply in the workplace: only by
combining contextual understanding with job-specific learning can evaluative,
interpersonal, and coordinating skills become translated into effective practice and
problem-solving.

An interview with a Health Care Assistant (HCA) provided insights into the interplay of
experiential and formal learning in care work, and suggested the advantage of qualification
structures that provide for a two-way movement between reflection and practical experience.
This informant commented that, through experience, she was better able than many
new grad nurses to read the signs if somebodys going to die.

And on more than a few occasions, they have been going to die, and Ive been able to let the
nurse know and theyve been able to call the family to get them in. (HCA, NZ, 2006)

She identified the tacit skills required for two-way communication with stroke
patients: And when youve got something rightyou can understand what theyre
saying back to you. She and her colleagues had collectively developed techniques for
providing behavioural cues to a developmentally-delayed fifty-year old patient, using
17
the patients doll to model what was required. Such collective development of these
skills (classified at level 4 in Table 1) was often informal. Indeed, highly-qualified
professionals might learn from care assistants in the cross-disciplinary team meetings
that the hospital has systematised. Such practical communication skills, gained
through trial and error, are becoming codified: for example there is now standard
training available on communicating with Alzheimers sufferers, and on de-escalating
aggression.

Our final example comes from the higher-level frontline job of caseworker, engaged
by a public sector benefits agency to work with people judged to need assistance with
personal and social issues if they were to make effective use of employment services
and welfare assistance. Normal caseworker qualifications were a generalist degree or
relevant life experience. Case management involved the building of ongoing
relationships through a combination of telephone and face-to-face interviews.
Caseworkers found themselves rapidly progressing through the experiential skill
levels in Table 1:

technologically we get five weeks training in the systems and applications. Ive been here
20 months and I still dont know how to use them all They cannot train you on how to use
all the systems entirely; that is impossible. Just the enormity of those systems and their
relationships. (Caseworker, NZ, 2006)

Nevertheless, the work required very rapid progression to the use of problem-solving
skills (Level 3):

From day one, you are expected to use discretion. It is the job essentially. You are to make
the decisions. You learn by trial and error Of course after a period of time, theres a
familiarity, even though every day there will be a circumstance we havent run into before
(Caseworker, NZ, 2006)

Unrecognised skill requirements meant that caseworkers tended to create informal
teams to learn from each other:

You identify very quickly who the people are that you work with, that are prepared to be
involved in your learning process, and who isnt. (Caseworker, NZ, 2006)
18

Awareness shaping and coordinating skills were thus being used at the level of
creative solution-sharing (Level 4): So its on the job training; reliant on your team
mates. The Level 5 skills of experience, relating to formal ways of bringing about
system change (Table 1) were more accessible to people in managerial positions, who
also had higher-level formal qualifications.

The focus here has been on establishing the existence of under-specified skills of
experience in lower-level jobs evidence that is currently being used to revisit such
jobs value and career path potential. Trials in May and June 2009 highlighted the
utility of our framework in providing a vocabulary for establishing skills required to
work in community organisations - skills whose scope extended to system-building
(NZ Department of Labour, 2009).


Conclusion: New Contradictions of Agency and Control

Skill needs some rethinking, putting an analysis of process back into conceptions of
work. Concepts such as communication, problem-solving or teamwork represent work
activities and processes, not skills as such, although the skills enable such work
processes to take place. Skill is the human capacity, individual or collective, to
perform work processes, and it entails learning. A way has been outlined of
conceptualising three sets of invisible, hard-to-define-service sector skills those
involved in awareness-shaping, interaction and relationship management, and
coordination. These skill sets underpin to varying degrees the demands of service jobs
that require the management of emotion, self and time.. Five skill levels mark
increasing levels of participation in work processes, resulting in workplace learning
through shared practice and problem-solving.

Whilst the descriptors above may call forth an impression of itemisation, even
fragmentation, each descriptor registers not a task, but an aspect of a process. As
Figure 1 suggests, the taxonomy provides a menu for the identification of nine skill
elements, exercised together at varying levels, each contributing to the ability to
combine discrete tasks into ongoing work processes. The integrated control of a work
19
activity is ultimately in the hands (or the soul) of the person performing it, expressing
workers individual and collective identity, itself partly embedded in the workplace.
Claiming skill is therefore, in part, claiming identity, and is a recognition of
agency.

There are tensions in this analysis which are interesting as well as troubling. First,
individual service sector workers should have their skills and competencies
recognised, developed, rewarded and valued. This requires fine grained apprehension
of work processes. However, making invisible work process visible is a two edged
sword. A more accurate understanding of what employees are really doing can
facilitate employer control. On balance, the advantages of recognising hidden skills
may outweigh this danger, although justice in remuneration requires more than
visibility. Recognition of skill has two aspects: seeing the skill, as well as giving its
possessor respect and dignity and paying for it. Second, although skill recognition
and remuneration are focussed on the individual, higher levels of individual
competence were found to be tied up with collective learning and practice. This
finding returns the analysis to the work process, the collective worker and, ultimately,
the question of identity.

Our analysis of skill development highlights the hidden injuries of routinisation. With
growing experience, workers may encounter an ever-widening gap between restrictive
job design and skills that are required yet thwarted, exercised covertly but under-
recognised. In attempting to clarify some of the theoretical issues that still bedevil the
concept of skill, the analysis has sought to put the process (both of work and of
learning) back into labour process concepts of service sector skill.


Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editor and the anonymous referees for their comments on an
earlier draft of this paper.

We particularly thank Philippa Hall, Director, Pay and Employment Equity Unit, NZ
Department of Labour, for guidance and project facilitation, Drs Alison Barnes and
20
Meg Smith (University of Western Sydney); Gemma Piercy (University of Waikato);
Dr Robyn Ogle (Deakin University); and Dr Peter Ewer (Labour Market Alternatives,
Australia). Validation work was undertaken by Janice Burns (Top Drawer
Consultants, NZ), Kerry Davies (NZ Public Service Association,), Dr Celia Briar
(Human Rights Commission, NZ), and Conor Twyford (Workplace Wellbeing, NZ).


Notes
1
A concept first used in a manufacturing context, cf Thompson 1989: xii, 82, 92

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25
Table 1 Framework for indentifying under-specified work process skills and skill levels




SKI LL SETS AND THEI R ELEMENTS







The SKI LLS OF:
SKI LL LEVELS
Breadth or depth of skill required for increasing levels of participation
Level 1.
Familiaris
-ation
Level 2.
Automatic
fluency
Level 3.
Proficient
problem-
solving
Level 4.
Creative
solution
sharing
Level 5.
Expert
system
shaping
Build
experience
through
practice &
reflection
Apply experience
independently &
automatically
Use automatic
proficiency while
solving new
problems
Help create new
approaches
through shared
solutions
Embed
expertise in a
system
Examples of activities using these skills
A. Shaping awareness:
Capacity to develop, focus and shape your own and
others awareness, by
A1 Sensing contexts or situations
A2 Monitoring and guiding reactions
A3 Judging impacts
Be alert to
jobs
contexts &
impacts of
your
reactions
Automatically
pick up on small
warning signs
Handle conflicting
levels of
awareness and
disclosure needs
Exchange
situational
updates and
new solutions
with colleagues
Use an
understanding
of systems in
order to
influence them
B. I nteracting and relating:
Capacity to negotiate inter-personal, organisational and
inter-cultural relationships by
B1 Negotiating boundaries
B2 Communicating verbally and nonverbally
B3 Connecting across cultures
Learn to
interact
respectfully
and easily
across
cultures
Gain cooperation
of people
outside your
authority
Pleasantly deflect
distracting
requests whilst
picking up subtle
signs of real need
Give
unobtrusive
guidance in
unequal power
situations
Crystallise
views of
diverse group
with apt or
memorable
language
C. Coordinating:
Capacity to organise your own work, link it into the overall
workflow and deal with obstacles and disruptions, by
C1 Sequencing and combining activities
C2 Interweaving your activities with others
C3 Maintaining and restoring work-flow
Learn to sort
and
sequence
own activities
& work in
with others
Automatically
address what
needs fixing up
or following
through
Maintain
workflow whilst
problem-solving,
assessing the
urgency of
competing issues
Build informal
information
exchange or
contingency
support network
Contribute to
sustainable
work systems
by coordinating
backup plans
26